Presidential Power - Presidential war in vietnam

As an experienced politician, Lyndon B. Johnson moved swiftly to exploit
this sentiment. Johnson told an aide, "Just you remember this:
There's only two kinds at the White House. There's elephants
and there's pissants. And I'm the only elephant."
This attitude encapsulated Johnson's conception of the presidency.
He saw the president as the initiator of major legislation, the creator of
the national agenda, and the dominant force in foreign affairs.
"The congressional role in national security," he
maintained, "is not to act but to respond to the executive."
He proceeded with this perspective in dealing with the warfare in
Southeast Asia. "I am not going to lose Vietnam," he told an
ambassador. Accordingly he sent more troops to South Vietnam and
instituted secret incursions along North Vietnam's coast and naval
patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin. This activity led to escalating clashes
with North Vietnamese forces. After an alleged second torpedo boat attack
on U.S. naval vessels, without verifying the reality of the assault and
determined to give the communists "a real dose," Johnson
ordered massive bombing of North Vietnamese coastal bases. Then he asked
Congress for a resolution, modeled on that handed to Eisenhower in the
Taiwan crises. With it, Congress promised to support all measures he would
take against armed attacks or to prevent aggression. Only two senators
objected to this open-ended grant of power. One of them pointed out that
"the Constitution does not permit the President to wage war at his
discretion."

Johnson argued he possessed that power but wanted it reinforced by the
resolution, which he compared to Grandma's nightshirt because
"it covered everything." He also made clear the decision to
use force "was mine—and mine alone." On this basis,
initially with high public approval as measured by polls, he steadily
enlarged the American war in Vietnam. Slowly, though, an antiwar movement
gained support and spread over the country. Some of its leaders accused
him of seeking support for a war that involved no vital national interest
by lying to the public.

Briefly, Johnson's intervention in a civil conflict in the
Dominican Republic in April 1965 shifted attention from the Vietnam
debate. He gave a variety of reasons for deploying 23,000 troops on the
island. Most often, he said he acted to avert a communist takeover and to
protect endangered American lives. The occupiers found no evidence of a
communist plot or peril to American lives. At home and abroad, jurists and
others denounced the intervention as a violation of international law.
Domestic critics pointed out that he had invaded without seeking
congressional consent. He responded that he merely exercised what had
become traditional executive power in foreign affairs.

Johnson offered similar rationalization for making war in Vietnam. He
cited the Tonkin Gulf resolution as evidence of congressional support for
his policy but asserted that he did not need its approval because the
"Commander in Chief has all the authority that I am
exercising." In the summer of 1966, as the public's approval
rating of his presidency plummeted, he said defiantly, "I'm
not going down in history as the first American President who lost a
war." He persisted in viewing conflict largely in terms of his own
stake in it, which he stretched to identify with the national interest. He
spoke of "my troops" and of his war that he would run his
way.

In an effort to refute critics, Johnson ordered the State Department to
prepare a tract justifying the war. Dutifully, a subordinate argued that
the president had ample authority to use force on his own, to decide what
constituted an attack on the United States, and thus to commit troops
anywhere in the world for such defense. He cited the Quasi-War and the
Korean War as precedents, thus in the latter case using an example of
dubious constitutionality to sanction another case of questionable
validity. All the while, antiwar activists denounced Johnson as a
"slob" and "murderer." This personal disdain
stained the presidency. Reverence for it declined. Polls indicated that
about half the public considered the war a mistake. Johnson took criticism
personally, dismissing it usually as unpatriotic. He placed antiwar
leaders under surveillance and violated their civil rights. At one point
he blurted, "This is not Johnson's war. This is
America's war."

Finally, much of the public and various legislators, even in the
president's own party, could stand no more. They said he had come
to exercise "virtually plenary power to determine foreign
policy" and "it is time for us to end the continual erosion
of legislative authority." Gallup polls showed that the public view
of the war as wrong had risen to 79 percent. Then, when a primary in New
Hampshire indicated that Johnson could not win reelection, he withdrew his
candidacy. The pubic did not turn against Johnson for using power
illegitimately, for lying, or for waging war unilaterally. They wanted him
out because of a failed use of the foreign affairs power in a war with
high casualties and no benefits. Americans had tolerated, and even
praised, comparable use of the war power by other presidents. None,
though, had exploited that power as outrageously as he did. With that
power he ran amok but did not, as some analysts claim, weaken the
presidency. Although Richard M. Nixon, in his second bid for the
presidency in 1968, benefited from the backlash against Johnson's
Vietnam policy, he too believed in the concept of executive supremacy in
foreign affairs. Like Johnson, Nixon was a man of vaulting ambition well
known for his hawkish views on the war. In his election campaign he
stressed that "the next President must take an activist view of his
office" and have a strong will. Nixon maintained that bold
initiatives abroad always had come from strong presidents. In office, he
acted on that premise.

From the start, Vietnam clouded Nixon's administration. Even though
he had promised to terminate the entanglement there, at his inaugural,
antiwar demonstrators—shouting "Four more years of
death!"—pelted his limousine with debris. Undeterred, he
reshaped Johnson's Vietnam policy while retaining its substance. He
continued an air war in Laos and peace negotiations in Paris, began
sustained bombing of North Vietnam, and launched secret air strikes in
neutral Cambodia. We must, he explained, negotiate from strength and not
withdraw unilaterally from the conflict in Southeast Asia.

Alarmed senators then passed a resolution that deplored past executive
excesses and recognized no presidential commitment to continue the war.
Claiming that as commander in chief he possessed sole authority over the
armed forces and could order them abroad without specific congressional
approval, Nixon ignored the resolution. He thereby charted a collision
course with Congress. He did pull some troops out of Vietnam, but peace
advocates complained about the slow pace. As antiwar demonstrations
escalated, Nixon bristled. As had Johnson, he declared he would not be the
"first American President to lose a war." Polls taken at
this time, October 1969, indicated majority support for his position.

In April of the next year, without consulting Congress, the president
launched an invasion of Cambodia, justifying it with various explanations
such as routing North Vietnamese ensconced there. "Bold
decisions," he said, "make history." A substantial
segment of the public viewed the action differently, as an unwarranted
widening of the war. Peace demonstrations escalated across the nation. To
counter the furor, Nixon asked the State Department to make a case for his
decision. Accordingly, an assistant attorney general, William H.
Rehnquist, argued that as commanders in chief, presidents had the
authority to order troops "into conflict with foreign powers on
their own initiative" and even to deploy them "in a way that
invited hostile retaliation." Hence, Nixon had acted properly.
Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. dismissed Rehnquist's
contention as "persiflage"—compromising historical
and legal scholarship for service to his client. Congress then revived an
endeavor to restrain the president's assumed power to make war
unilaterally. The Senate passed a bill forbidding involvement in Cambodia
without its consent and repealed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Nixon
dismissed these measures, avowing that as commander in chief he could
maintain the warfare on his own. At this juncture, for seemingly personal
reasons, Nixon unilaterally made another controversial foreign relations
decision. In a war between India and Pakistan that broke out in December
1971, despite considerable sentiment for at least neutrality, he sided
with Pakistan. He ordered a naval task force into the Bay of Bengal to
intimidate India. Critics pointed out that the United States had no vital
stake in the conflict, yet he alienated India and risked possible war with
the Soviets, who sided with India. In February he did enhance his image as
a maker of foreign policy with a trip to the People's Republic of
China that initiated a détente with that old foe.

In December 1972, Nixon ordered twelve days of around-the-clock bombing of
Hanoi and Haiphong. Critics denounced it as war by tantrum, as violence
beyond all reason, and called him a maddened tyrant. He responded that if
the Russians and Chinese thought "they were dealing with a
madman," they might then "force North Vietnam into a
settlement before the world was consumed by larger war." Finally,
public pressure drove him in January to conclude cease-fire accords with
North Vietnam, but he continued secret bombing raids in Cambodia and Laos
as well as aid to anticommunist regimes in the region. When these actions
became known, Congress decided to enact "definite, unmistakable
procedures to prevent future undeclared wars." It compelled Nixon
to end hostile actions in Indochina.

Meanwhile, the Cold War presidential practice of covertly aiding
conservative candidates for high office in foreign countries backfired.
Nixon had directed the CIA to block Salvador Allende Gossens, a socialist
legally elected president in Chile, from taking office. When that effort
failed, Nixon ordered the CIA to organize a military coup against Allende
that on 12 September 1973 led to his murder and to a right-wing
dictatorship in Chile.

In October, as Nixon's involvement in the Watergate scandal came to
light, the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Egypt and Syria erupted. He
airlifted supplies to Israel. To counter an alleged Soviet plan to
intervene, he ordered a worldwide alert of U.S. forces, including nuclear
strike forces. Critics regarded this order as unnecessarily drastic. They
suspected he issued it to divert public attention from his troubles with
Congress, or as an example of using the foreign policy power to deal with
domestic political exigencies. Then, on 7 November, after decades of
debate over the war-making capacity in the president's
foreign-affairs power, Congress overrode Nixon's veto to adopt the
War Powers Resolution. It required the president, in the absence of a
declaration of war, to report to Congress within forty-eight hours after
ordering troops into a foreign conflict. Unless the legislators approved a
longer deployment, he had to withdraw the force within sixty days. The law
allowed an extension of thirty days if the president deemed that time
necessary for a safe withdrawal. It also placed curbs on his ability to
circumvent Congress, to deploy armed forces in hostile situations, and to
engage in covert military ventures. But by permitting the president to
deploy forces for a limited time without congressional consent, it
subverted the aim of collective decision making in foreign policy. As
skeptics pointed out, the resolution delegated to the president more power
in foreign affairs than the Constitution allowed. It granted him freedom
to wage war for several months anywhere in the world as he chose.

Despite his critics and facing impeachment, Nixon contended he had acted
much like other strong executives who had taken for granted an inherent
right to employ their foreign policy power to intervene unilaterally in
other nations, especially weak ones. They, too, had lied, acted covertly,
and had skirted Congress. Only he suffered punishment, and only because of
evidence uncovered in secret tapes he made of White House conversations
about his involvement in the Watergate scandal. This was true, but he did
abuse the foreign policy power more than his predecessors.

While out of office, Nixon continued to defend his extravagant conception
of the strong executive. He contended that in wartime the president has
"certain extraordinary powers" that make otherwise illegal
acts lawful when taken to preserve the nation. In this perspective, the
president alone decided what served the best interest of the nation.
Critics maintained that with such views and his behavior, primarily in
foreign affairs, he demonstrated that unrestrained power in the hands of a
paranoid president could endanger democratic government.